Saddam Hussein’s Ghost Haunts India’s Silicon Valley
By M.P. Prabhakaran
Bangalore, India: Those who executed Saddam Hussein live in Iraq. Those who stage-managed his messy trial and hasty execution live in the United States. Then why were the people of Bangalore, living half the world away from the U.S. and a quarter of the world away from Iraq, made to pay a heavy price for Saddam’s trial and execution? Those who organized a pro-Saddam rally in this city on January 19, 2007 will have to answer one day. The chief organizer was C.K. Jaffer Sharief, a long-time politician from the state of Karnataka, a member of the Congress Party and a former railway minister under the central government. Bangalore, it may be added, is the capital of Karnataka State.
The rally was held at Shivaji Nagar, a densely populated area of the city. The proclaimed purpose of the rally was to condemn Saddam Hussein's execution and criticize the U.S. policy that led to it. People of this cosmopolitan city had no problem with that. Though most of them, like most people in the rest of the world, detested Saddam’s dictatorship, they, like the rest, did not like the way he was tried and sent to the gallows. But they all ask one pertinent question: Why did the organizers wait for three weeks after Saddam’s execution to hold a rally to condemn it? They say the organizers had other agendas on their minds in doing it. What they say is not without merit. Some of the organizers were disgruntled politicians, shunned by the electorate, desperately looking for ways to rehabilitate themselves.
And the choice of a Friday, a Muslim holy day, for holding the rally could not have been accidental either. The organizers knew that most participants would be Muslims. Of the city’s 6.1 million people, more than 13 percent are Muslims. Most Bangalore Muslims, like most Muslims in India as a whole, are Sunni, the predominant sect to which Saddam Hussein belonged. Of the 1.1 billion Indians, about 140 million are Muslims.
Banners Burned
According to newspaper reports, over 30,000 people attended the rally. Many came by trucks and buses and some on foot, marching in precessions. One such procession was wending its way to the venue of the rally when it saw some banners hanging across the road. The banners did not carry any offensive message. But the mostly-Muslim procession, or at least the extremists in it, took offense to the fact that they were put up by a Hindu organization, the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS). Banners announcing the organization’s plans to celebrate the birth centenary of its late leader, M.S. Golwalkar, had begun to appear in various parts of Bangalore several days earlier. The main events of the celebrations were scheduled for Sunday, January 21.
The Muslim extremists pulled the banners down and set them on fire. The seed of violence that shook the city for three days had already been sown. It needs emphasizing that the seed was sown by pro-Saddam rally-goers. The violence escalated on January 21, when the Hindu group took out its own processions, as previously planned. Police had a very hard time coping with the situation.
There is a blame game going on in the city right now. Some blame the police for having permitted the rallies at all. Others blame the city administration for not anticipating the possibility of rallies like these going out of control and for not making adequate preparations to meet such eventualities. Most Bangaloreans, however, blame the organizers of the January 19 rally and Saddam supporters in India for starting the whole thing. They find themselves in agreement with what The Times of India, one of India’s leading English dailies, said in its lead editorial on January 23. Aptly titled “Riot after Riot: Bangalore bears the brunt of mob fury,” the editorial said: “What is intensely disturbing is that politicians are trying to fish in troubled waters and tap emotional issues for their narrow gains with disastrous results.”
Not only politicians, the intellectuals who spoke at the rally are also to blame for the “disastrous results.” Notable among the intellectuals was M.J. Akbar, Editor in Chief of The Asian Age, another leading English daily in India. No open-minded person would object to the criticism all speakers, especially Mr. Akbar, leveled against the Bush administration for what it did to Iraq. The reason the administration gave for starting the Iraq war turned out to be a lie. The way in which it has been conducting the war and managing the affairs of Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein is deplorable. The trial of Saddam and his hasty execution made a mockery of all legal and ethical norms. For all these reasons, the Bush administration deserved to be condemned.
But the question is: Should, in the process of condemning it, one elevate a man who was aptly called "The Butcher of Bagdhad" to the level of a saint? That, I am afraid, is what Mr. Akbar has done in his speech. To pour paeans of praise on a ruthless dictator, whose rule was replete with atrocities committed against his real and imagined political enemies, ill-behooves any intellectual, let alone one of Mr. Akbar's stature.
Saddam Endured With U.S. Help
Also, Mr. Akbar’s opinion that “as long as Saddam was alive, the U.S. could not have endured” is questionable. In fact, the converse is true: Saddam endured for a long time with the support he received from the U.S. Of course, the U.S. had a vested interest in supporting him at the time. The part of Mr. Akbar’s speech that makes one throw up is this:
“Today, the world remembers Saddam – and history will record it – that he was the man who did not surrender but fought against the U.S. – and died – holding his head high.” Yes, he did not surrender. He was ferreted out from a hole where he was seen hiding, trembling like a rat, while many of the brave soldiers in his army were fighting U.S.-led coalition forces and courting death for his sake.
Two days of mob violence, in which an 11-year-old boy was killed, scores of men and women were injured, including several policemen, houses and shops were ransacked, and vehicles were set on fire, gave many areas of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, a war-torn look. Walking around those areas one couldn’t help wondering whether they were haunted by Saddam’s ghost. One couldn’t help thinking that while Iraqis themselves, except some Sunni insurgents, were struggling to forget the memory of Saddam’s tyrannical rule and get on with their lives, some Saddam worshipers in India were trying to portray him as a demigod. What a shame!
[First published on January 25, 2007. It has since been slightly edited.]
[Readers are invited to comment. Send your comments to letters@eastwestinquirer.com]
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Reader's Response
Indians Fight for Dead Foreign Causes
I am sorry to hear that M.J. Akbar got involved with Jaffer Sharief's crowd. Indians, of both leftist and rightist varieties, fighting for dead foreign causes do not surprise me. They have been doing it all the time. Let us face facts. Indians living in India have no national identity, even though 7000 years have elapsed since their nomadic ancestors immigrated to the geographical area that later came to be called South Asia.
Kulamarva Balakrishna, Vienna, Austria
January 26, 2007